Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir

by William B. Davis

  Since we were still friends she expressed no surprise when I phoned and suggested we go for dinner. She still expressed no surprise when I ‘popped the question.’ In fact, her response was decidedly enigmatic. Only later did she tell me that she felt as if I had slapped her in the face. Even I wasn’t conceited enough to expect her immediately to fall at my feet in gratitude, but I didn’t think a proposal would be seen as an aggressive act. Still, once over her shock, she did allow that the idea was worth thinking about.

  And so Judith did think about it, and think about it, and think about it some more, and several months later said, “No.” Or did she? Here is what happened. That summer during the season at Lennoxville when she was once again an actor in the company, she became very close to one of the stage managers, whose name I seem to have lobotomized. We were still in an era where we tried not to be possessive, to understand that close relationships with others of the opposite gender were welcome, and where we were open about all aspects of our personal lives. And so as Judith grew closer to her new friend I was kept fully informed but, not to worry, it wasn’t sexual and it didn’t threaten her primary relationship with me. And then, one night she didn’t get back to the house until very late, long after her show had finished. Fearing the worst, I couldn’t sleep and walked the back roads waiting for her to get home. When she did return she was surprised to find I was still up; we weren’t supposed to be jealous or possessive. When I asked if she had slept with him, she admitted that she had.

  What should be the next chapter to this story? Now I guess there would be a big fight. She ‘cheated’ on me, the situation is intolerable, she should pack her bags and leave my house. What was the outcome in 1974? After a short discussion we went to bed together. She admitted that sleeping with two men on the same night was quite a turn on. While I don’t think I admitted it at the time, it was a turn on for me as well.

  It is fascinating to speculate on the biological imperatives at play. Was she the adulterous chickadee, who having found a partner to help with the nest and the young, wanders afield to pick up some better genes in the hopes that the dimwitted cuckold will raise a young that is not his? Was I attempting to be the alpha male, confident that my sperm would triumph over his and any progeny from the evening would be mine? Whatever the unconscious motives, Judith assured me ours was still the primary relationship and her new friend, lover, was not a threat, only an enriching experience for them both. We believed this stuff at the time.

  The season came to an end, Judith and her stage manager said their sad farewells, and she and I headed to Muskoka for our annual holiday. After two or three days at the cottage, with Judith seeming in a daze, I finally said to her, “You don’t want to be here, do you?” She admitted that she didn’t, that she really wanted to be doing a road trip to Mexico with her stage manager. There was nothing for it. We put her things in the boat — there was still no road into our cottage — drove the boat to my parents’ cottage where we kept the car, made some excuse to the family why Judith was leaving, and I drove her into town and put her on the bus.

  I never saw her again.

  Needless to say, I took all this as “No,” that my proposal had been rejected. Wouldn’t you? A few months later Judith phoned me. She was back from Mexico and along with other casual conversation said she missed our talks together. By this time I was already involved with Francine and neither of us suggested actually meeting. I’ve wondered since if she were really saying, ‘I’ve had my fling — I realize what we had — let’s look at it again.’

  Timing. A series of random events. Gone another way and my wonderful children would not exist. Perhaps I would have had different children. What would they have been like?

  Single again, I rattled around the large cottage mostly on my own though I did invite houseguests from time to time. In the fall I returned to Toronto to the house in Cabbagetown that Judith and I had rented from friends of hers, where we had planned to live together and where she would share the rent.

  Why was I renting a house in Toronto in the first place? After three years of working full-time at Bishop’s and planning and running Festival Lennoxville, I decided I couldn’t do this anymore; something had to give. My first decision was to resign from the Festival and continue in the Drama Department at the university, possibly tempted by the letter from the Principal informing me that I had been awarded tenure. But before many steps were taken to replace me as Artistic Director I was prevailed upon to rethink my decision. Imagine if I had accepted tenure? Like my friend Curt Rose in the department of geography, I might have stayed another thirty years, earning a secure living working in an idyllic university setting. Of course I would not have been Cancer Man. Would Cancer Man have been Cancer Man had another actor played that role in the pilot? Was my decision influenced by my hoped for marriage to Judith as there was really no future for her in Lennoxville? I don’t remember. Or was it my continuing ambition that encouraged me to escape the loving embrace of the university into the cold realities of my profession? Whatever the process, the Festival designed a half-year position for me to continue as Artistic Director. It was up to me to find enough freelance work to make a full-time income.

  To do that, and to plan future seasons successfully, I needed to base myself in Toronto, then as now the centre of English-speaking theatre in Canada. For the next three years I lived partly in Toronto, partly in Lennoxville, and partly in whatever Canadian city would hire me to direct a play, still not thinking of myself as an actor. A first order of business: how was I to pay the rent for the house without Judith contributing her share? My mother came to my rescue, but perhaps not in the usual way parents rescue their children. When my mother retired from her job at the Institute of Child Study she gave up her Toronto apartment and settled into King full-time with my father, though it was a marriage now more in name than practice. But she needed a room in the city where she could meet her lover of twenty-five years at least once a week. Seemed odd to me as she was going on seventy, but certainly an easy economic solution. (I have a different view of sexual relations at seventy now.) All I had to do was be out of the house every Tuesday afternoon. And so this room in the house that was to have been Judith’s became first my mother’s hideaway until her lover’s health failed, and later my infant daughter Melinda’s bedroom though she much preferred her parents’ room.

  No story of my loves in the seventies would be complete without mention of Calla. After Judith left, Calla became my most devoted companion. We were inseparable; my love for her was uncomplicated and joyous. We woke every morning to fervent expressions of love. When she died the following summer I was devastated and cried as never before or since. A lovely black-and-white collie, she had been given to me by my brother Rolph and his wife, perhaps to ease my loneliness.

  But I was not destined to stay lonely for long. I was hired to direct A Doll’s House at the Globe Theatre in Regina, at that time being run by Ken and Sue Kramer whom I had known since my LAMDA days. In the company that included the dynamic Lally Cadeau, whom I had persuaded them to engage as Nora, was an American/Canadian actress whom I didn’t know, Francine Baughman, who was playing the supporting role of Mrs. Linde. I met her for the first time in the theatre’s Green Room. She had long blonde hair and a great figure well revealed by a halter top. When introduced to me she walked over and stared at me from about six inches. What seemed like sudden intimacy turned out to be blindness for she was not wearing her contact lenses. Friendly and outgoing, she appeared to be keeping company with a young man in the cast of the play preceding Doll’s House, in which she was also playing while rehearsing with me. It turned out she was married to the actor Duncan Regher who was living in Toronto.

  As rehearsals progressed so did an attraction between us, an attraction that was finally accepted just after the play opened. As a director I had no reason to stay on in Regina after the opening though I did stretch it for a couple of days before climbing into my Volkswagen Rabbit and embarking on the t
wo- or three-day drive back to Toronto. Interestingly, Sandra Ward — yes, that Sandra — had been my travelling companion on the way out; she was going west for some reason I don’t now remember.

  Of course that might have been the end of it. Francine was married after all. But she did contact me after she returned; we went out for dinner and I gave her a key to my house should she have a mind to use it. Her relationship with Duncan seemed very odd to me: when he was performing at night she was expected to prepare him a meal at home after the performance; he didn’t let her go alone to and from the subway. And yet they relished being a leading couple who went to all the film openings. Perhaps I offered her something more relaxed, more human. And so, one night I woke to find Francine hovering over me. She had left Duncan and had come to live with me. It could be argued it was a decision a touch too hasty on both our parts and yet we were to stay together for sixteen years for better or worse, certainly better for the two wonderful children we produced.

  When I left Bishop’s and based myself in Toronto, I had to give up my Shangri-la in Sawyerville, and so each summer I rented a two-bedroom suite in the university residence. I still kept my ski cabin in Vermont while beginning to water ski competitively in Sherbrooke, the city adjacent to Lennoxville. In my last year at the Festival, Francine came with me and we shared the suite. Over time we developed a cute tradition — I don’t remember how it started — she would give me some version of a duck as an opening night present. Unlike me, Francine was a person of extremes, and when that summer she presented me with two real ducks I might have questioned our suitability for each other. In case you haven’t tried it, ducks make lousy pets. All they do if kept indoors is eat and poop — a lot. And quack. I don’t remember how we got rid of them, but I think Francine came to realize they were not a practical addition to our household. And we had begun to consider adding a child to the household.

  At this point John Douglas returned to my life, a delightful man truly out of his time. John, who had been an actor in our summer theatre company in the fifties was now Executive Producer of Radio Drama for the CBC in Toronto. He was looking for a new full-time Director of Radio Drama, and after a short audition — he had me direct a half-hour drama for which I was smart enough to get Gordon Pinsent to play the lead — he offered the position to me. While more of a sideways career move, the job offered geographical and financial stability, a practical decision with a child on the way. And so Francine and I settled into family life in Toronto and my love life stabilized — for a time.

  Toronto Redux

  And so I returned home. Toronto, well southern Ontario, has always seemed like home even though I haven’t lived there for much of my adult life. Francine and I settled full time into the house I had originally rented with Judith. My mother’s needs for her room in the house were fading as age was affecting both her and her consort. And before too long her room was occupied by Melinda, our first child. Well, that’s not true exactly. The room contained her crib, playpen, and other paraphernalia of a young child’s life. It just never contained the child. Melinda at age nothing had the good sense to realize that her needs would be best served by being with her adults at all times. And her adults, influenced by books like The Primal Scream and dreading the sound of her crying, accepted her judgement. Melinda moved into our bed and before long I moved into her room, a state of affairs that lasted for several years.

  Melinda was always remarkably clingy as an infant and toddler. Francine and a friend with a child the same age would sometimes shop together, and while Melinda clung to Francine’s leg the other child would race off and disappear into the store. While some could happily set their child in another room, Melinda insisted on being at her parents’ side at all times. New and indulgent parents that we were, we accommodated her as well as we could. There seemed no psychological difficulty; she was just different.

  Years earlier at the National Theatre School we had pondered a related problem. When the now wonderful actress, Nicola Lipman, was a student, we, as faculty, struggled to understand why she did not connect in her work to the other actors. It took some time to root out her problem, just as it took a long time to root out Melinda’s. They were both nearly blind. Nicki couldn’t see the other actors, a problem easily solved with contact lenses. No wonder Melinda clung to her adults; she couldn’t make head or tail of a threatening world. Eyeglasses are a wonderful thing.

  We now began to use the cottage at Muskoka on a more regular basis. Some years earlier when Veronica and I were still together, my mother had suggested that we take over Saint’s Rest as my grandfather had modestly named his now abandoned summer home. Decaying mansion that it was and is, I loved Saint’s Rest and miss it to this day; my brother Tim owns it now. It is a house built for another era, with deep covered verandahs to protect the well dressed occupants from the sun, folding windows around the sun room and dining room that haven’t worked since World War II, a dark sheltered living room with a large stone fireplace, and upstairs bedrooms structured to divide the staff from the family. I think I would have liked the twenties, as long as I was one of the rich.

  We bought a used ski boat, and before long Francine developed the arcane skill of driving a boat while nursing an infant and keeping one hand on the trick release so that she could release the ski rope if I fell doing a toe trick. (A toe trick is performed with the skier’s foot in a bridle on the rope handle.) Soon we sold the A-frame at Jay Peak and bought a small bungalow near the Osler Bluff Ski Club in Collingwood and painted it in browns and reds to try to make it look like a ski cabin, surrounded as we were by the upscale ski houses of the wealthy members of the club. Osler Bluff is a private ski club on the Georgian Bay escarpment where what limited skiing available in Ontario is situated. Private clubs have gobbled up much of the choice terrain and at that time membership was both expensive and restricted, the nonrefundable initiation fee being something like $50,000. Even though they didn’t ski, my parents had been bullied by my uncle who did to join the club in its founding years in the early fifties for the princely initiation fee of $100. Francine and I settled into a normal life, unusual for itinerant actors and directors; I worked regular hours with weekends off and normal vacations. Oh yes, and I got a regular paycheck.

  The work itself, developing and producing drama for radio, while not a great career advancement — I mean, who was listening to radio drama in the late seventies? — was pretty interesting, and I worked with some talented actors, writers, and musicians. With a sense of the absurd or not, as my first assignment John Douglas assigned me the full-length Man and Superman in stereo, which was new at the time. In case you are unfamiliar with this work of George Bernard Shaw, it includes a long philosophical debate in hell between the Devil and Don Juan, so that the entire work runs roughly five hours. When performed on stage the Hell sequence is usually omitted, but we did the full monty. I wonder how many people actually listened to the whole thing. But I had a great cast, with Neil Munro as Tanner, Jackie Burroughs as Ann, and Alan Scarfe as the Devil, and I began what became a long association with the talented composer John Mills-Cockell.

  We developed a satirical political drama, 24 Sussex Drive, about a fictional Canadian prime minister played by Ted Follows, the same Ted Follows that had rehearsed in our basement so many years before. And from time to time one would have lunch with John Douglas in a style already losing favour at the time and now long forgotten. One would go to his regular restaurant, be greeted by his regular host, and sit at his regular table. Two or three martinis and many cigarettes would precede a leisurely meal, conversation on a wide range of subjects, a few of which would pertain to our work together, finally returning to the office two hours or more later clutching coffees to go. Regrettably this was not a sustainable lifestyle, and John died prematurely.

  Before leaving us, he decided to leave the CBC and pursue his writing ambitions full time. In doing so, he set in motion a pattern all too familiar in my career. No sooner did I settle into a job, but m
y immediate superior decided to leave, placing me in occupational limbo (see Chesterfield, Dundee, National Theatre School). There were two stages to the hiccup at CBC Radio. The first flowed seamlessly as I was appointed to John’s position of Executive Producer when he left, responsible for the Sunday hour-long drama series still going from its heyday under Andrew Allan as CBC Stage. But I had only settled into this new position for a few months when the Head of Radio Drama, Ron Solloway, decided to throw his career to the wind and travel around the world. Ron had been a delight to work for, giving his producers both gentle guidance and lots of autonomy. What would happen now? Here we go again. The obvious internal candidate was guess who, me, and I duly put my name forward. In their wisdom, the CBC decided to go with an outside candidate, not a worry in itself as I was happy to stay in my current position. No, the worry came when one of our staff saw the newspaper report and showed me the picture of our new leader. My heart sank. While I had never met Susan Rubes I knew of her from my theatre life — she had founded Young People’s Theatre in Toronto — and while she had success bullying Boards of Governors and getting media attention, her reputation in the artistic community was dreadful. Hoping I had misread the fragments of gossip, I went to an actor I respected who had worked for her to ask his opinion. When he looked heavenward and rotated his index finger around his ear I wondered if I should resign then and there, but with a family to support it didn’t seem like an option.

  For a few months I tried as best I could to keep up with my responsibilities as Executive Producer, a job which I was enjoying in itself. But maybe that was a mistake, maybe I should have gone to Susan as soon as she arrived and said, ‘Here I am, what do you want me to do?’ so that she would feel she had full authority. Readers by now will be aware that I am not good at surrendering authority. I’d like to say I gained respect for her as we worked together, but my first opinion, that she was the wrong person in the wrong job, only strengthened over time. If she had been a nice person with a little humility perhaps we could have managed. I imagine she charmed the heck out of everyone above her in the hierarchy; unfortunately she only buttered her bread on one side. My issues with her came to a head a few days before I was to leave on my annual cross-country trip to meet with the contributing producers to the series I was responsible for. Meetings were arranged, flights were booked, and Susan cancelled the trip. Did she need to rein in my autonomy, autonomy Solloway had easily granted? Was I not being sufficiently deferential? Whatever the reason, I felt I could not do my job as Executive Producer in those circumstances and, as was my right, resigned that position. An Executive Producer at CBC was like a department head, an add-on position with a small additional stipend, separate from the main job of producer. Her response, which was not her right, was to fire me as producer. And while I successfully grieved her decision and won a cash settlement I was, nonetheless, out of a job. And in case you were wondering, there are no jobs for radio drama producers in Canada — or North America — except at the CBC.